


Go On to the End

by lirin



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:08:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: A paperwork mixup gives Colin permission to join Merope at Denewell Manor in January 1940.  Unfortunately, he arrives in September—and the drop won't reopen.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Go On to the End

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Redrikki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/gifts).



> Many thanks to my very helpful beta, drayton.

_Name_ , the first blank said. "Colin Templer," Colin wrote neatly. It wouldn't do to lie about that part, or the entire exercise would be a waste.

He put his true date of birth as well—since the whole point was to convince Mr. Dunworthy that a youth's perspective would be valuable, it didn't make sense to give inaccurate data there. But most of the next section of the form asked for Oxford-specific data that Colin, still a secondary student, didn't have, so he fudged the truth flagrantly. The time before last that he'd done this, he'd tried leaving it blank, but the secretary had laughed and told him not to submit incomplete forms, and then he'd dropped it in the bin. He hadn't even bothered to send it on and let Mr. Dunworthy be the one to discard it.

And sending the form to Mr. Dunworthy was the whole point. It wasn't as if he was ever going to let Colin travel to the past—at least not until he was much, much older—but until that far off day, Colin wasn't about to let Mr. Dunworthy forget that that was what Colin wanted.

 _Intended destination._ For most historians, this was the part they had thought about for years and agonized over at length before filling out this form. But then, they actually expected to be able to go to that destination. Colin had no such expectation, and so he figured it didn't really matter what he wrote there. He remembered Merope mentioning her assignment to a manor in Warwickshire. She was getting an adult's perspective on the evacuations, but surely the perspective of a child would contrast in many respects from her own. Colin shuffled through the papers he'd "borrowed" from Mr. Dunworthy's desk until he found the records for Merope's drop, and copied the information neatly onto his own form: "Denewell Manor, Warwickshire. 4 November 1939–2 May 1940." No, since this was supposed to be a historian's first drop (technically it would be Colin's second, but nobody was ever going to let him officially count the thing with Kivrin), he ought to keep it shorter. Not that it mattered, since this was all an exercise in pretending—and maybe deceiving himself a bit too—but he might as well keep things realistic. He erased the dates of Merope's drop and wrote "9 January–16 February 1940." That sounded much more reasonable.

He rummaged in his schoolbag until he found the gobstopper he'd bought yesterday afternoon and popped it into his mouth: a reward for a job well done. He glanced over the paperwork one last time. No missing blanks, no obvious lies. Mr. Dunworthy's secretary—whoever it was now in the revolving collection that had followed Mr. Finch's departure—would have no excuse to return the form or discard it. It would at least make it to Mr. Dunworthy's desk and sit there for a week until he got back from his trip to Japan. (Once he _did_ get back, Colin suspected the papers would end up in Mr. Dunworthy's wastepaper basket within ten minutes, but at least he'd have to look at them first.)

Colin waited until the secretary—some scrawny fellow Colin had never seen before—stepped out for a moment, then tiptoed in and set the papers in the desk tray labeled "IN." That way, the secretary would have no way of shoving the papers back in Colin's face, and if he laughed, Colin wouldn't have to see it.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled back across the quad. Another term, another reminder to Mr. Dunworthy that Colin Templer still existed and that he still really wanted to be a historian. His work here was done.

***

The stamped form appeared in Colin's mailbox at Eton only two days later. It took Colin a minute to even realize what he was looking at, because it seemed so impossible. "Approved," the bright red stamp said, right on top of where Colin had written his name in his neatest block capitals.

There was no way Mr. Dunworthy had let the form go through like that. Whoever this current secretary was, he must be trying to take care of Mr. Dunworthy's paperwork for him, instead of letting it pile up. Mr. Dunworthy must not have told him about Colin. Mr. Dunworthy couldn't know what his secretary was doing, or he would have told him to stop.

But he hadn't told him to stop. And he wouldn't be back from Japan for nearly a week.

Colin clutched the papers tight, nearly stabbing his fingernails through "Denewell Manor." If he hurried, he just might—

Well, it wouldn't do to count his chickens before they hatched. But right now, sitting on the edge of his bed in his small room at Eton, he was closer to the past than he had been since he'd jumped into the net alongside Mr. Dunworthy half a decade ago. 

He set the papers down on the bedspread and did his best to smooth out the places where he'd crumpled them in his excitement. He already had an assortment of costumes prepared that he'd collected over time, so that part was taken care of. He'd have to find out who was running the net on the drop date they'd assigned him—only five days out, the day before Mr. Dunworthy got home, thank goodness—and if it was Badri, he'd have to try to convince somebody to swap shifts with him, because Badri would be sure to phone Mr. Dunworthy and the game would be up.

And then there was research. As far as World War II went, Colin had concentrated on Polly's assignment in London. He knew all about the various bombs and underground closures there, but he hadn't bothered with the history of evacuees in Warwickshire beyond the minimum he'd needed to fill out this paperwork that he hadn't thought mattered.

But now it mattered, and he needed to know everything there was to know about the evacuation of children to the countryside during World War II. Before next Friday.

Biology class could wait. Colin shrugged his jacket back on, tucked the papers into his pocket, and ran for the bus station. He had research to do.

***

Thankfully, due to his adventures during the 2054 flu epidemic, Colin had a great deal of experience in doing errands around Oxford—and also quite a bit of experience avoiding the people he didn't want to run into. Of course Mr. Dunworthy was easy to avoid right now, being out of the country and all. But Colin also made sure to steer clear of the rubber-stamp-happy secretary whose name he didn't know, just in case he figured out what he'd done. And he figured he didn't need to drop by the lab until right before it was time to depart, and that way he wouldn't risk running into Badri and inspiring any awkward questions. The couple of times he'd seen Badri, he'd looked plenty harried, so Colin hoped that meant he wouldn't have any spare time for looking at details for drops he wasn't in charge of. The tech Colin had been assigned was someone named Linna. Colin had never heard of her, and with any luck, she'd never heard of him either.

He spent all of his waking hours putting together his costume, researching everything he could think of—the year 1940 as a whole, the general history of evacuation, the geography around Denewell Manor, and a bit more about Polly's department stores just in case he got the chance to pop down to London for a weekend—and doing just enough schoolwork that his teachers didn't get upset and decide to phone his guardian. If he was going to do this, he might as well do it right, and show Mr. Dunworthy how capable he was.

Linna didn't ask any questions when Colin showed up in costume only a minute before his assigned drop time, and so Colin didn't offer any attempts at conversation either. She looked as harried as Badri had, and gave all her instructions in short clipped sentences in between taking phone calls, poking at buttons on the console, and scribbling on a clipboard. "Stand there." "Don't move." "We're sending you through on Merope Ward's drop so we don't have to recalculate." More poking and scribbles. "Are you ready?"

Colin nodded. Surely any moment Badri would come bursting in to the lab, or Mr. Dunworthy, or the secretary. Surely he wasn't actually about to—

He was surrounded by woods. Colin blinked a few times, but the trees all stayed where they were and didn't fade into the beeping of an alarm clock or the sound of a teacher yelling his name, as sometimes happened when he thought about traveling to the past. This time, he'd really done it. He allowed himself a moment of silent celebration, jumping up and down a couple of times, before getting down to business. He needed to find the manor, present his forged papers, and find out how much slippage there had been. It seemed to be late afternoon as best as he could tell from the sunlight filtering through the treetops, so there had probably been a couple of hours of slippage.

"Are you a new evacuee? What are you doing wandering around the woods?" asked a girl's voice, and Colin whirled around.

"Maybe 'e's a fifth columnist," the boy standing next to her suggested. They both had their hands on their hips and were staring intently at Colin.

"What? No!" Colin yelped. "No, I just got lost looking for Denewell Manor. My mum told me somebody would meet me at the train but it didn't arrive at the scheduled time so they probably didn't know I was coming." He had no idea when the last train had arrived, so he decided that he would just claim that he'd lost track of time wandering around the forest, and leave the particulars as ambiguous as possible.

"Then what're you doing over 'ere?" the girl asked. "The train's that way, and you would've 'ad to walk all the way _past_ the manor to get 'ere."

"My mum always told me I had a bad sense of direction," Colin said. "I'm afraid she was right. Um, can you help me find the manor? I'm sure I'll just get turned around again."

"Only if you 'elp us find Alf's snake first," she said. "It got loose."

"What kind of snake?" Colin looked around at the ground around him, with shrubs and sprouts and leaf mould and a million places where a snake could hide. "There could be lots of snakes around here. How will you know if it's the right one?"

"There _aren't_ a lot of snakes around here," the boy—Alf, apparently—said. "I looked for hours before I found this one, and now I've lost 'im."

Colin kicked half-heartedly at some leaf mould. "Were you here when you lost it? Because I didn't see you, and I've been wandering around here for a while." He hoped they hadn't been here for too long themselves, but then these woods were large enough that their paths could conceivably not have crossed. And they couldn't have been close enough to see the shimmer, or the net wouldn't have opened.

"Of _course_ I was here," Alf said. "Why, do you think I'd look for 'im where 'e ain't? I'm not a noddlehead."

"Yes, you are," the girl said. "That's why you lost 'im."

"Um," Colin said, as another kick at the leaf mould made it ripple for longer than the laws of physics alone would account for. "I think there's something here."

Alf pounced. "Got 'im!" he cried after a moment, brandishing a small garter snake.

"Good," Colin said. "So can you help me find the manor?"

"Sure," Alf said. "If you're lucky, we'll find Eileen, instead of Mrs. Bascombe or Una. I think she's hanging out the washing, so we'll go around the back. Eileen's the one person at the manor wot's actually kind to us."

"That would be nice," Colin said. "Thank you." It would be _perfect_ , actually, but he didn't dare say anything further for fear he might accidentally let on that he knew who Eileen was. Shouldering his bag, he followed the children out of the woods.

***

A maid came hurrying across the manicured grounds of the manor before they'd crossed more than half of the distance between the woods and the main house. "What did you two do with the basket of sheets that was in the second floor stairwell?"

"It weren't me," Alf said.

"I didn't see nothin'," the girl added. "We were in the woods the whole time, helpin' this poor new evacuee."

"Um, hello," Colin said. Merope was staring at him, eyes wide. "I'm Colin. I was told someone would meet the train but I suppose they got the times mixed up."

"Right," Merope said. "Alf, Binnie, go get that basket from wherever you took it, and put it back in the stairwell. Colin, I suppose I'd better take you up to meet her ladyship. Is that all your luggage?"

"Oh!" Colin said, taking the hint from her wide eyes. "I had another small bag but I must have set it down when I was helping Alf look for his"—at a glare from Alf, he changed course and didn't mention the snake—"his rock that he'd dropped in the woods."

"We'll help you look for it!" Binnie volunteered at once.

"Absolutely not," Merope said. "I need you two to return that basket. I'll go help Colin look for his bag." She seized Colin firmly by the arm—she might be half a head shorter than him, but her grip was like iron—and led him back across the grounds once more.

 _"What,"_ she said as soon as they were out of earshot of the children, "are you _doing_ here."

"I have permission," Colin hastened to say. "I filled out an application and it was approved. Getting a youth's perspective on the evacuations. My papers say I'm fifteen and a half; I figured that was close enough to my actual age to be plausible. I'm not going to stay here the whole time you're here, just a month and a half. Say, is it still the ninth? I need to verify my temporal-spatial location. Well, temporal at least; I've already verified that this is Denewell Manor since Alf and Binnie didn't say otherwise and since you're here."

"The ninth of _what_."

Colin blinked, and abruptly realized that the weather was not at all indicative of January. "Um, I was supposed to come through on the ninth of January. 1940."

"Well, it's 1940 at least. But today is the first of September, and the manor is being handed over to the government for use as a riflery training school in two weeks."

"I thought your assignment ended in May. Why are you still here?"

"My drop won't open."

"But that doesn't—" Colin blinked at her. "I just came through your drop."

Merope stopped and seized him by the shoulders, her hands trembling. "You're sure? They didn't give you a separate drop?"

"No, Linna said it would be less work to just reuse the calculations they'd done on yours. She didn't seem to know that your drop wasn't opening."

Merope ran her hands through her hair, scarcely seeming to notice how much she was mussing it. "When you showed up, I thought I could use your drop. Or that maybe you were even an ad hoc retrieval team, like you were for Kivrin Engle. But if you had eight months of slippage, and my drop won't open, then something's terribly wrong."

"Maybe it was just broken for a while and now it'll open," Colin suggested.

"That's what I intend to find out," Merope said, and led the way through the woods.

***

The drop didn't open that afternoon, or any other day after that. Merope had difficulty getting away from the manor during the day, but she insisted that Colin spend every spare minute staking out the drop, and then they traded off sneaking out at night. But there wasn't even the slightest glimmer, not even once.

Several times, Alf and Binnie appeared in the woods near Colin, and he had to make up excuses for why he was there. And of course he couldn't expect the net to open when they were anywhere around, so that was all that time wasted. He complained about their meddling to Merope, who sympathized and did her best to manufacture tasks that would keep them occupied elsewhere, but they outnumbered her two to one, and had the added advantage of not caring if they got into trouble. So there were several times that Colin ended up wandering back to the manor in disgust, with Binnie trailing after him asking questions like "Are you meetin' a soldier? That's what Mrs. Bascombe says people do in the woods."

"I was looking for snakes," Colin called over his shoulder, and went to wander around the manor until he could casually and apparently coincidentally run into Merope.

All too soon, it was time for the manor to be handed over to the government, all the evacuees except four (counting Colin) had been sent away, and still the drop wouldn't open. "We'll find Polly in London and try her drop," Merope said firmly, as they huddled together in the woods in the dark on that last night. "It will all be all right, I'm sure."

"I'm sorry I showed up and caused more trouble for you," Colin said. "I didn't know there was trouble with the net, or I never would have come."

"They can't have known there was trouble either, or they wouldn't have sent you." Merope paced across the small clearing and back again. "But I'm glad you're here. You did all that research for Polly, and you remember more details of her assignment than I do. I didn't do much reading about the Blitz because I thought I'd be long gone by then."

"I'll write out a list of which Tube stations to avoid," Colin said. "Or perhaps I'd better tell them to you and you can memorize them, so there's less evidence for people to think we're spies."

Merope nodded. Colin realized that dawn must be near for him to be able to see her movement. "We need to get back before we're noticed," he murmured.

Merope nodded. For a long moment, she laid her palm against the ash tree at the edge of the clearing in some sort of benediction or farewell, and then she followed Colin back to the manor.

***

They—Colin, Merope, and the three legitimate evacuees she was escorting to London—managed to have a compartment all to themselves on the train trip, thanks to Alf and Binnie's scaring off all comers. Colin was quite impressed at their range of excuses; they rarely doubled up on the same scheme, but moved without a moment's pause from accusing passengers of being fifth columnists to pretending to have a mouse to actually having a snake (not the same one Alf had found in the woods; that one had long ago been left in a bowl that Mrs. Bascombe had momentarily stepped away from).

Colin had hoped to find Polly that same day, and he felt sure that Merope felt the same; but by the time their motley crew had wandered this way and that and finally reached Theodore's house, the sirens were about to go, and they had to spend the night in the flooded, loud, and utterly miserable Anderson shelter in the backyard. Colin didn't dare make even the most oblique references to his and Merope's plans—they might go over Theodore's head but the Hodbins were far too clever not to pick up on things. And so instead he curled up at the end of the damp bottom bunk and tried to snatch a bit of sleep in the midst of all the children's complaints.

***

Theodore was of course already home, but it took most of the morning to deliver Alf and Binnie, as Merope insisted on waiting until their mother got home and she could turn them over to her personally. By the time Colin and Merope were alone on the bus to Oxford Street, it was nearly noon and Colin's stomach was growling.

"Do you want to stop somewhere and get lunch before we go to Townsend Brothers?" Merope asked, staring out the window of the bus.

Colin wasn't sure what she was looking at. It was as overcast outside as it ever was in London, and there was nothing particularly interesting going on. Probably she'd fallen into the historian's habit of observing contemps whenever possible. But as Colin looked out the window next to her, he wasn't sure how much there was to observe. The bus was moving too quickly for them to get more than a few seconds' glimpse into the life of any one person, and they couldn't hear what they were saying at all. 

"Colin, lunch?"

Colin jumped. "Oh, right. No, let's find Polly first. Maybe we'll even be able to eat lunch in Oxford. And if not, at least we'll be able to enjoy our meal better knowing we've already accomplished our goal."

"That makes sense," Merope said. "I only hope you don't end up regretting it when it's late in the afternoon and you haven't eaten since breakfast."

"It won't be," Colin said. "We're going to find Polly and everything's going to be all right; you said so yourself."

Merope was still staring out of the window at the people walking by. "Do you suppose everybody out there thinks they're going to be all right?" she murmured. "Not necessarily that they think the war will end soon or anything, but just that their lives will turn out for the best in the end."

"Some of them do, but not everybody, I suppose," Colin said. "I wonder if maybe there's as many people out there who are wrong about that, and think their lives will turn out all right when they actually won't, as there are people who think their lives are going to be awful but then they're better than they expected."

"Which ones do you think we are?"

"I have no idea," Colin said. He turned to the window and watched the contemps wander by, all oblivious to the fact that they were being observed.

***

Townsend Brothers was much larger than Colin had pictured. "Are we just going to wander around the store until we see her?" Colin asked, surveying the edifice from across the street. "If we go to a whole bunch of departments and don't buy anything in any of them, eventually people are going to get suspicious."

"There's enough different floors and there will be different employees on each," Merope said. "As long as we don't spend too much time on any one floor, we ought to escape suspicion."

"We should've brought the Hodbins with us," Colin said. "They're good at distractions. We could have had them manufacture a diversion for us."

"On the other hand, they look even less like they belong here than you and I do," Merope said. "We'd get kicked out even faster."

"Not with the way the Hodbins can dodge authority figures," Colin said with a grin. "It would take them a long time to kick them out."

"Well, they're not here, so we'll make do with what we've got," Merope said. "Fix your hair. It's too bad you didn't come up with a higher class cover identity. Just because the majority of evacuees were lower class doesn't mean all of them were."

"Do you suppose there's an employee entrance? Maybe we should just wait there for Polly to leave, and not try to pretend to be shoppers at all."

"That would have you regretting skipping lunch for sure," Merope said. "Perhaps we should come back tomorrow morning and try to watch the employees arriving."

"Come on, let's go see if we can find the employee entrance. We can ask if anybody there knows Polly."

"Better yet," Merope said, "we'll go to the personnel office and tell them that somebody—maybe her uncle—got shot down and so we have to find her right away."

"Maybe it should be somebody closer, like her brother, or a sweetheart or somebody."

"No, she could have mentioned siblings or romances—or lack thereof. But few people know the exact number of one's aunts and uncles. I don't even know if you have any aunts or uncles."

"I don't," Colin said. "But I had a great-aunt and some people don't have those, so it balanced out. Do you have any aunts or uncles?"

Merope shook her head. "No, I'm all alone in the world." She stepped off of the curb and led the way across the street. "I suppose I'm even more so now that I'm here in a different century, but I don't feel much more alone."

"Because you didn't leave much behind," Colin said. "I feel the same way. Well, except for Mr. Dunworthy. I miss him. I probably should have told him I was coming here, but then he would have told me not to."

"You didn't—" Merope nearly yelled. She stopped, swallowed, and grabbed Colin by the arm. "You didn't tell Mr. Dunworthy you were coming here?"

"I filled out all the paperwork, so he knows by now," Colin said. "And maybe he did know, I don't know. I sent the form in, and it was approved. I assumed it was his secretary, but maybe he approved it himself."

"You know that's not true," Merope said.

"Well, yes."

"And now the drop won't open. He's going to be incandescent."

"Probably," Colin said in a small voice.

"I can't believe you." Merope held tight to his arm for another few seconds, before finally letting go and striding around the side of the building. 

Colin ran to catch up. "So are we looking for the personnel office now?"

 _"I'm_ going to look for the personnel office," Merope said. "You're going to stay here and keep an eye out in case Polly leaves while I'm inside. And don't wander off, because Mr. Dunworthy is sure to blame me if anything happens to you."

"It wouldn't be your fault," Colin said. "It's my fault I'm here, I know that."

"You know that, and I know that, and Mr. Dunworthy probably knows it, but that doesn't mean it's not other people's fault too," Merope said. She sighed. "Just stay put."

Colin nodded, and watched her walk away towards the back of the department store. He found a convenient wall to lean against, and shoved his hands in his pockets. He'd scarcely had any chance to observe the evacuees when he'd been at Denewell Manor, what with arriving so late after most of them had left, and then spending all his spare time keeping an eye on the drop for Merope. He wondered why the net had even let him through if he wasn't going to actually be able to accomplish anything. 

He supposed he might as well observe the townspeople who were walking past him, but none of them were doing anything that seemed worthy of note. He ought to ask Merope—or hopefully, he could ask Polly too—what they were looking for when they observed contemps. They'd gone to lots more classes on how to be a historian than Colin ever had. And he didn't want to go home with nothing to show for it.

Well, not if he could help it. But if he wanted to go home at all, he might not be able to be choosy about when and how that happened. If Polly's drop opened, they might even go home tonight, and all Colin would have to write about would be a bunch of sitting around in the woods, a train trip, and a day wandering around London and loitering outside of department stores.

After what seemed forever, Colin looked up and saw Polly walking towards him. He felt certain he would have recognized her anywhere, in any time. He wasn't sure whether she was as likely to recognize him, though; and rather than wait to see whether she saw him, he immediately started waving frantically. After a second, he realized that of course it was Merope walking next to Polly, and felt rather silly. Merope had probably already told him that he was here, and so of course Polly would have already seen him.

 _"You're_ the retrieval team?" Polly asked as soon as she was within speaking distance. "How did you convince Mr. Dunworthy to let you get away with that?" She looked around. "Is he here? He wouldn't have let you come on your own, of course."

"Merope didn't tell you what's going on?"

"We were inside a department store seething with contemps," Merope said. "Speaking of which, this isn't much better. Polly, is there somewhere quieter where we can talk? Or even better, you can take us to your drop and we can talk on the way."

"It won't open," Polly said, but she started walking anyway. Colin and Merope followed her.

"Maybe it will now that we're all here, or something," Colin said.

"My drop wouldn't open, but then somehow it opened to bring Colin through," Merope added. "Which is the opposite of what we needed, because now we have more people stuck instead of fewer."

"You came through Merope's drop?" Polly frowned. "Why? You're not here for retrieval, are you?"

"Like Merope said, we're stuck too. Something's wrong with the net, and we're all stuck here unless—until—it decides to open again."

"It will," Merope said. "My drop opened for you, so Polly's drop can open for us."

"But if you didn't come to retrieve me, then _what_ are you doing here?" Polly returned to the topic that Colin had rather hoped she'd lose track of.

The explanation of the paperwork mixup, as Colin insisted on calling it (since it made it sound like it wasn't his fault) took up the entirety of the bus trip to Polly's drop, all in hushed whispers, though Polly's tone sounded as if she'd much rather be yelling.

"Well, here it is," Polly said finally, leading them to a recessed brick alleyway. "Shall we stand around here until the sirens go?"

Merope nodded. "I told you we should have had lunch first," she said.

***

After a few hours, the drop still hadn't opened. Colin checked his wristwatch. "The sirens are due to go off in ten minutes," he reported.

"Oh well," Merope said. "It was a long chance anyway."

"I'm sorry," Colin said.

"It's not your fault the net won't open," Merope said.

"No, but it's my fault that you're stuck with me here and not just fending for yourselves. I didn't mean to be an additional burden on you, but I guess that's all I'm going to be."

"But the net let you through when it wouldn't open for us," Polly said. "Maybe it had a reason."

"You mean something like how now you'll be too worried about keeping me out of trouble to have time to be upset that your drop won't open? Not that I plan on getting into trouble, of course. Well, more than the amount of trouble I'm already in with a drop that won't open and paperwork that Mr. Dunworthy may not have known about."

"Well, selfishly, I'm glad that I'm not alone anymore now that I have you and Merope stuck with me."

"I don't plan on giving up yet," Merope said. "Maybe the drop will open tomorrow, or one of the days after that. We'll keep trying."

"And in the meanwhile, we have a fantastic opportunity for further observational research," Polly pointed out. "Merope, I think I can probably help you get a job at Townsend Brothers. They're short-handed these days. Colin, how old do your papers say you are?"

"Fifteen, but if I splotch some grease over the last digit of my birth year I doubt anyone will look too closely. I'm closer in age to eighteen than fifteen anyway, so it should be easier to pass as older."

"Absolutely not, you are not enlisting in the army."

"I was just thinking of getting a job helping the war effort," Colin said quickly. "Don't worry, I don't want to leave England any more than you do. But I want to do my bit, and I don't just mean taking a turn at checking whether this drop is opening. If we're staying here, we might as well do what we can to help."

"I suppose it's easier to keep hope alive when we have something to do," Polly said. "That's what everyone around us is doing, and they don't even have any idea what's going to happen."

"If they aren't giving up hope, then we don't have any right to give up hope either," Merope said.

"So we'll keep trying?" Colin checked his wristwatch again. Only a minute or two until the sirens.

"There's no reason to stop putting one foot in front of another, just as we've been doing," Merope said. "At best, we'll get home someday."

"And at worst?"

Polly stood up from where she had been sitting against the brick wall, and brushed off the back of her skirt. "At worst," she said softly, "at worst we'll be together."

Colin nodded. The air-raid siren began to wail, and he followed Merope and Polly out of the alleyway.


End file.
